Google accuses Viacom of "seeking to make carriers and hosting providers …

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Google has finally filed its answer in the case of Viacom v. YouTube, accusing Viacom of threatening "the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression" with its lawsuit.

Viacom sued YouTube in March, accusing the Google-owned video sharing site of "brazen" copyright infringement. Viacom said that by the time it filed the lawsuit, it had identified over 150,000 clips on YouTube that infringed its copyright and asked for them to be taken down. Viacom also argued that YouTube's reliance on rights-holders to notify it of cases of infringement places an unfair burden on them.

Although Google raises a number of defenses in its response, they really come down to two issues: DMCA Safe Harbors and fair use. Under the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision, a web site operator cannot be held liable for infringing material posted by one of its users if it takes down the material once it is notified by the rights-holder. YouTube is covered under the DMCA Safe Harbor, argues Google, because it immediately responds to takedown notices—sometimes without investigating their legitimacy—once they are issued.

Viacom says that's not enough, but that argument will be a difficult one to make. Copyright attorney Greg Gabriel told Ars back in March that while YouTube may be testing the limits of the DMCA, "Viacom is asking them to do something that the letter of the law does not require. Viacom is really asking the judge to do something extraordinary here."

Since the DMCA does not require that site owners actively monitor content for potential infringement, Viacom is hoping the judge interprets the law as broadly as possible. One significant hurdle for the entertainment company will be a lack of precedent for the judge to draw on.

Google is actively developing a content fingerprinting system that it will deploy in an attempt to keep copyrighted material off of YouTube. According to Reuters, at a briefing yesterday, Google's managing counsel for litigation Michael Kwun told reporters that the company has already deployed a system that it can use to identify material that has already been removed should it be uploaded once again, but has yet make its video fingerprinting tools available to rights-holders.

Google is arguing that it not only follows the letter of the law when it comes to its Safe Harbor obligations, but that it goes "well above and beyond what the law requires." For YouTube to prevail in the case, it will have to convince the judge that its business model isn't built on infringement, as Viacom argues, and that Viacom's interpretation of the DMCA Safe Harbor falls outside of the law's scope and intent.

Color Viacom unimpressed with Google's defense. "This response ignores the most important fact of the suit, which is that YouTube does not qualify for safe harbor protection under the DMCA," a Viacom spokesperson told Ars. "It is obvious that YouTube has knowledge of infringing material on their site and they are profiting from it. It is simply not credible that a company whose mission is to organize the world's information claims that it can't find what's on YouTube. Unfortunately, Google continues to distinguish itself by failing to join the majority of major digital companies that have affirmatively embraced the legal rights of copyright holders."

Next up is a case management hearing in late July, with a trial looming on the more-distant horizon: Kwun said that there have been no settlement talks between the two companies.